If you ever run out of ideas of what to blog about, something you might consider doing is reviewing a top website that’s in your industry or on the fringe of an industry you’re a part of. I’ve just written and published a review on one of the top medical information websites in the United States on my Medical Billing Answers blog and I thought I’d share the process I used for writing the review without necessarily talking about the review. Of course, if you decide you want to read it & learn what I had to say… it’s all good. 🙂

U.S. Pacific Fleet via Compfight

First, you have to decide what your intention is in wanting to write a review, other than the fact that maybe you couldn’t think of anything else to write about. In my case, my website takes on not only medical billing issues but health topics as well. I was already pretty familiar with the site I decided to review and it seemed to be a perfect fit since I’ve visited it many times over the years. This way, I could see whether it fit my standards or not by looking at it deeper than I had previously.

Second, you have to set up your general criteria for what and how you’re going to review a site. In my case, what I decided to do was come up with 5 questions that I thought a lot of people might search for, but not necessarily the top questions that everyone would search for. For instance, there’s probably a lot of people who go looking for more information on how much water they should be drinking. Instead of going with the norm, I decided to look for information on how much water is too much water to drink daily.

I also decided for some of them to write them up as a question, the way many people do today when searching for information on the internet. I don’t know anyone who would put in “drinking water” expecting to find out how much water is too little or too much so it made sense to do it that way. However, a person who’s been given a new prescription might put in the name of the pharmaceutical and nothing else when wanting to get more information on it; I did that as well.

Third, if you really want to be fair you should look around a bit if you don’t find what you’re looking for immediately. I did that and, unfortunately for the site, a couple of times I couldn’t find the information I was looking for; quite disappointing. That’s the kind of gripe I used to have when I was trying to fix things on my blogs in the past and, when I’d find a site, be disappointed because the articles would leave out a lot of things in the middle, assuming we would already know all the other stuff.

In this case, when I didn’t find the answer on the site I went to the search engine and looked up the information to see if it was elsewhere… and it was. To me, that’s a major fail. However, the extra research helps make the review that much stronger.

Fourth, try not to go in with unfair expectations or personal feelings. Whereas I always thought this site was top quality (it was also one of the earliest sites on the internet covering this kind of information), it’s never been an exclusive site for me to go to. Therefore, though I knew of it, I had no real expectations one way or the other. I wasn’t harder or softer in reviewing it than I might have been if I knew any of the people who put the site up; it’s always good to be neutral before reviewing something.

Fifth, set up a way to grade the sites and then explain it. I decided on the American school grade system of A-F because I figured most people would be familiar with it, though I could have gone with the stars. I felt the letters gave me more flexibility because of the added “+” or “-“… one of which I used in my review.

Those are the steps I took, and I got a post of nearly 1,400 words out of it. I have to admit that I toyed with the idea of adding that sites logo to the post as my image but in the end decided to go with something totally different; that’s all I’m saying about it unless you decide to visit the post. lol

There you are; now, what will you review?